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Over the last several days, there’s been an outpouring of emotions, ranging from frustrated to sad to rage-angry about the announcement that Ring of Honor, as we all knew it, is dead with Ring of Honor management having to piece the broken vase back together again, hoping it will be something more streamlined that it will appeal to the very audience that once uplifted the promotion to a position of being a true evolving force in terms of the art that is professional wrestling inside the ring.
There is a lot to take in, so we’re going to break it down as much as we can for a situation that will continue to evolve in the days and weeks ahead.
IS RING OF HONOR DEAD?
The name isn’t and the brand still exists as part of the Sinclair Broadcast Group family, but yes, I would decree ROH as we know it is dead. You don’t inform every single talent in your company that if your deal is up at the end of the year, you aren’t being renewed, effectively leaving you with a few guaranteed checks left before New Year’s Day, unless ROH as we know it is dead.
You also aren’t telling the talents who have deals that run beyond 12/31/21 that you’ll only be contractually bound and paid through a certain period of time, which we have heard lands in late March or April.
Remember, this isn’t some of the roster. It’s not the undercard. It’s everyone, whether they hold titles or not, whether they have been there since 2002 or 2020, everyone has been told their end date and given the blessing to go work independent dates. No one was safe.
If a promotion is bound by the locker room that performs for it and that locker room now disperses to all different corners of the world, whether that means signing elsewhere, grinding on the independent scene or leaving the business, well, then yes, that locker room is dead and so is the promotion, at least until it starts running again consistently, which ROH COO Joe Koff states will be this April.
That is six months away, but if the promotion is going to run Wrestlemania weekend in Dallas (which we have heard is the plan and that a venue has already been secured), then they need 6-8 weeks of lead time to announce talents and a card. That puts Ring of Honor in mid-February when they are shutting down in December. There’s zero chance the existing locker room reassembles as it is, so again, ROH, as we knew it, it’s dead.
WHAT HAPPENED?
In our interview with an obviously upset and shell-shocked ROH COO Joe Koff pretty much spelled it out. Ring of Honor is part of a larger organization, the Sinclair Broadcast Group. While no one is going to out and out admit this, right about this time every year is when ROH would find out their budgeting for the following year while they were being reviewed by SBG. This is what happens in the corporate world.
Let’s look at the last year-plus in Ring of Honor. The pandemic hits and they cancel their anniversary weekend in March 2020. ROH goes on a full hiatus with no new content being produced and their weekly series becomes an anthology featuring the best of talents in the company with self-shot content from the talent as bookmarks. When ROH starts to come out of hibernation, they film, at great expense, in front of empty arenas to create new content while putting the talent through rigorous medical testing and a week’s worth of quarantine in hotels in order to hit the required medical standards of the Maryland State Athletic Commission. Eventually, they return to some live events, but there’s no momentum, COVID is still a thing and just a few hundred fans are coming to the shows. ROH returns to shooting in front of empty arenas and at one point, the Final Battle PPV is considered as an empty arena event as well.
Ring of Honor paid everyone their full rate this entire time, whether they were wrestling or not. They covered the costs of all of their guaranteed contracts for dozens upon dozens of talents as well as some (but not all) independent talents and staffers who were scheduled to work events. Everyone was paid as if ROH was running, except it wasn’t. It also wasn’t selling tickets, merchandise was down, PPVs were not what they were, you name it.
Every metric of the company obviously dropped, so what do you think happened when the clock ran out and it was time for the ROH Sinclair overlords to, well, overlord, the promotion? Everything you might expect. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that Sinclair saw the promotion was not bringing in anywhere near what it needed to bring in in order to cover the overhead involved in maintaining the roster. So, sadly, Wednesday’s massacre went down.
Someone reading this is going to point out Sinclair has tons of money and why would they do this? Well, WWE makes more money now than they historically ever have, yet when the pandemic hit, off with a lot of people’s heads!
This Sinclair situation was no different and it was certainly out of Joe Koff’s hands, because if there was a guardian angel within Sinclair for ROH, it was Joe Koff. That was his baby and quite frankly, the initial purchase happened in 2011 because of and for Joe Koff.
Why was it out of Joe Koff’s hands? Sinclair has way bigger issues to deal with currently than maintaining a pro wrestling roster and producing a pro wrestling series with a big overhead.
As covered this week by SeekingAlpha.com, massive investments made by Sinclair into acquiring regional sports networks and a planned launch of Diamond, an over the top streaming service that has been delayed due to issues with Major League Baseball to the point the entire Diamond franchise may just file for bankruptcy, has put a squeeze on Sinclair. They put out a lot of money with the forecast being business as usual, but COVID hit and like everyone from WWE to Disney, companies that were usually proactive were now reacting to the landscape shifting and flipping around them. Sinclair has been no different and the squeeze is on, plus now they are looking at insane amounts of damages and expenditures related to the recent ransomware attack on the company. All of that battle damage and loss of money means it trickled down to Ring of Honor, just as it did all other corners of Sinclair.
Before Wednesday, obviously there were issues. While Wednesday was the death blow, if we are going to be honest, this was probably a quiet death by a thousand cuts, except there was a safety net because Sinclair could maintain the promotion, no matter what, at least until this week. ROH lost talent and momentum at times due to outside forces, booking mistakes and sheer bad luck.
WWE NXT attempted to take their slot as the alternative promotion and picked up a lot of ROH stars, from Adam Cole to Roderick Strong and beyond, in that process. If you didn't look at NXT and see they were openly apeing what made ROH unique to fans in its best moments and tried to curate that under Triple H's umbrella, I've got a dozen Brooklyn Bridges to sell you.
Later, AEW launched and with the platform of TNT, captured the imagination of a lot of lapsed wrestling fans, changing the game forever. Never before had a promotion, with the exception of All Japan Pro Wrestling, have to deal with so many talents exiting at one time at the end of 2018 as ROH did, but even if AEW hadn’t come along, it was a foregone conclusion that once The Young Bucks and others found out what they could command on the open market elsewhere, they were leaving. The narrative seems to be that ROH didn’t try to keep the Bucks, but they did, even offering them big raises and creative control, but the reality is that elsewhere, they could and did command far more than ROH could or would offer them in the moment and it was time to move on.
Joe Koff himself in our interview admitted that in hindsight, he had been too conservative and should have taken the leap in 2018 that others took in 2019. But, it didn't happen, thus ROH, who had once been the leader in the alternative of professional wrestling, was now at least third in a crazy horse race with lots of other younger prospects, like MLW and GCW, coming up from behind. Much like ECW sparking so much of what WCW and WWF did in the 1990s, ROH ended up inspiring other brands and promotions to come to life and what had been a garden of their own making now became a very crowded marketplace.
Some will point to ROH Creative and that the company should have tried something new, but that’s unfair because they were certainly going to. The promotion gave Marty Scurll what was believed to be the biggest deal in ROH history to perform and book, but with the pandemic, nothing that he worked on ever went into execution and then for forces well beyond ROH’s responsibility or control, they were forced to extricate themselves from their deal with Scurll in the wake of the #SpeakingOut movement. Scurll was expected to have been a big part of the solution to a lot of the issues plaguing the company as it tried to find its way out of the labyrinth it was trapped in. Instead, it became another compounding factor in the issues.
All of these things, as well as creative ideas that didn’t work, a lack of a destination home for ROH programming (partially caused again, by the pandemic leading to the cancellation of a planned live, weekly studio series that would have emanated from Maryland), the loss of momentum and lots of factors, great and small, I am failing to recall as I write this, all played into the situation.
Sometimes you can make mistakes and book your way out of them. Sometimes you can overcompensate to make up for things out of your control. But, sometimes, the clock runs out and you find yourself picking the wrong symbol in The Squid Game. That, unfortunately, was ROH.
In my opinion, the strength of Sinclair would have insulated ROH from the battle damages incurred by all of this forever (or at least until Joe Koff retired), but Sinclair ran into lots of its own problems and that changed the game.
SO WHAT NOW?
Joe Koff states that Ring of Honor will return after pivoting into its new incarnation this April, but six month is about 100 lifetimes in professional wrestling. So, we will see. They will obviously, as of this writing at least, not be putting any talents under any big money salary, guaranteed exclusive deals.
However, that doesn’t mean they can’t protect the sanctity of storylines by offering, say, Jay Lethal, a contract for x amount of dates from April to October 2022 to lock him in for those dates while he works elsewhere on the independents. ‘
Whether they go that route will remain to be seen, but certainly, the budget won’t be what it once was. In many ways, the promotion will likely be closer in form to what it was when it launched in 2002, an attempt to bring in the best possible talent for that date and put on a show that tries to capture the imagination of the audience.
While I hate with all my heart that a locker room that worked so hard has lost their jobs, perhaps this shift will be the kick in the ass ROH itself needed so it moves forward and spotlights different talents and different concepts.
ROH was always meant to be a lot of things to a lot of people, but it never meant to be stagnant. Joe Koff says that ROH is going to be more fan-interactive and be there for the audience more. That was pretty much the early bible for ROH when it was running monthly in Philadelphia, to try and fill the void of what the deaths of ECW and WCW left behind for pro wrestling fans. Today’s landscape is different. The world is oversatiated with professional wrestling and fans aren’t going to come and spend their time, much less their money, if they don’t feel they are being given a quality show or spectacle.
If ROH is truly going to continue on and return to form, they are going to need to figure out what and where today’s void is, fill it and do it in a smart, meaningful and entertaining fashion. If they can’t, nothing else is going to matter, not the roster, not the venue, not the matches, not the product. ROH existed for a long time as a rallying cry for die hard wrestling fans who wanted their pro wrestling to be different. It’s time for ROH to figure out how to be different from all the other pro wrestling that has come and usurped their position....and now they will need to do it without a locker room that has any loyalty to the brand. That is a hell of an undertaking.
WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
It means that the Ring of Honor we knew will soon be gone forever, although depending on how you felt and what defined ROH for you, it may have already been gone. There used to be an old comic book argument over what was the best version of The Avengers or The Justice League. The answer really was, whichever version you grew up with.
There were generations of ROH fans who grew up with the company, some from the early days. Some from the Cary Silkin era. Some from the days of Gabe Sapolsky. Some from the Sinclair era. No matter when or where you cared about Ring of Honor, it was yours at a certain period of time to love and embrace, because it brought you joy. No matter how many shows you attended or DVDs you bought or friends you made, ROH should be remembered for the smiles and the excitement it brought you when other places in professional wrestling didn’t offer that for you.
ROH was a place that made the Murphy Rec Center and the Frontier Fieldhouse destination venues.
ROH was the place where Bryan Danielson truly found his first home in professional wrestling.
ROH was the place where CM Punk first truly dropped a pipe bomb on his audience.
ROH was the place where Samoa Joe walked in with one booking, fought to the bitter end with Low Ki, and ended up with a job for life.
ROH was the place where Special K took over the show and turned it into their WrestleRave.
ROH was the place where Paul London and Bryan Danielson had their Epic Encounter.
ROH was the place where the Prophecy of Christopher Daniels’ career was finally fulfilled.
ROH was the place that brought Japan’s finest, from Kenta Kobashi to Jushin Liger to The Great Muta to Kazuchika Okada to Mitshuaru Miswa to Dragon Gate and beyond, to fans in the United States.
ROH was the place that saw a literal riot during their first anniversary show.
ROH was the place where Homicide and Steve Corino brought some of the most physically violent and grueling battles ever seen.
ROH was the place where beloved veterans, from Bruno Sammartino to Dusty Rhodes to Bret Hart, appeared in classy, distinguished moments.
ROH was the place where Jim Cornette and Bobby Heenan worked against each other for the first time.
ROH was the place where Kevin Steen and El Generico shocked and awed all with brutality and insanity.
ROH was the place where AJ Styles was a star before TNA ever debuted.
ROH was the place where Elite was forged in the United States.
ROH was the place where the Punk-Joe trilogy not only saved the promotion, but put the focus back on what was going on inside the ring.
ROH was the place that changed the face of Wrestlemania weekend forever, choosing to run Supercard of Honor events regularly to give the traveling fans a chance to try ROH out for themselves.
ROH was the place that broke tradition and made history by running Madison Square Garden.
ROH was the place where Austin Aries, Rush, Nigel McGuinness, Homicide, Xavier, Tyler Black and so many others grabbed a World Championship belt in a moment of glory as their dreams came true.
ROH was the place where Jimmy Jacobs, BJ Whitmer, Cheeseburger, The All Night Express, Allison Danger, The Age of the Fall and so many others left their first true footprint in professional wrestling.
ROH was the place where tag team wrestling was defined by Jay and Mark Briscoe.
ROH was the first super-independent promotion.
ROH was the place that went to war with CZW inside the Cage of Death.
ROH was the place that helped ignite the Philadelphia independent wrestling war.
ROH was the place that produced over 500 episodes of weekly TV.
ROH was the place that, to date, produced 76 pay-per-view broadcasts.
ROH was the place the late Doug Gentry poured his soul into.
ROH was the place where Trent Acid showed the world what a shining star he could have been.
ROH was the place where Cary Silkin was not just the ambassador, not just the former owner, but its biggest fan.
ROH was the place where no one was happier to be there than Joe Koff.
ROH was the place where fans came to cheer and boo, to beat their hands on the guard rails, to throw streamers and to be in a space where they knew they were going to get their money’s worth.
ROH was where the Code of Honor was enforced.
ROH was where the modern era of professional wrestling was born and nurtured.
ROH was Ring of Honor.
Hopefully one day, somehow, it can be again.
Until then, smile and remember your friend fondly, because once they are gone, good or bad, all you want to think about are the happy memories.
So think about them and cherish them. They are yours, just like Ring of Honor was.
Mike Johnson can be reached at MikeJohnsonPWInsider@gmail.com
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